20 years (further) on: whither politeness studies now? Opening up the binaries

We must begin by explaining the "20 years" in the title of this special issue.It is, after all, only 19 years since the very first issue of this journal in 2005.We might seem to be jumping the gun somewhat.In fact, the 20 years refers to something different, the lapse of time between the 14th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS14) in 2002 and 24th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS24) in 2022.Both of these conferences were held at Ghent University in Belgium.At the first of them, a colloquium on, "First-order and second-order politeness: The dispute over modelling politeness" (convened by Richard Watts, Gino Eelen and Jim O'Driscoll) created a significant impact, helping to set the tone for (im)politeness studies in the 21st century.In view of the fact that most of the contributors to that 2002 colloquium are still active in the field, and inspired by this return to Ghent, it seemed only right and proper to convene a "20-years-on" colloquium at SS24 with the aim of considering the current state of affairs in the field, especially developments since that time.Accordingly, we did so.Many of the 2002 "veterans" participated, as well as many other prominent researchers.In fact, we received so many fine contributions that, in order to comply with the scheduling restrictions imposed by the conference organisers, we ended up with two nominally separate colloquia.As far as we were concerned, though, they were part of the same event.This special issue contains nine selected contributions that emerged from both parts of that event.An additional inspiration was the SS24 theme of Inside and Beyond Binaries.This theme was intended to be meaningful for all branches of sociolinguistics, but it resonates especially clearly in our field, calling to mind several major (apparent) dichotomies.One of these, the distinction between first-order ("commonsense") and second-order ("scientific") perspectives, was the headline of the 2002 colloquium and